


When You Say Goodbye

by crossingwinter



Series: Not According to Plan [3]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-04
Updated: 2016-03-04
Packaged: 2018-05-24 14:33:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6156697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Now is not a time for a moment to revel in his victory.  It doesn’t feel like a victory.  It feels like a lie.  It was a lie, and she’s about to find out the truth.  <em>And hate me,</em> he thinks.  He hopes she won’t.  She might not.  He tries to cling to that hope.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When You Say Goodbye

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PrioritiesSorted](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrioritiesSorted/gifts).



> So, this is the climax scene of a longfic I probably will never write (especially now that I’m posting this). So if it feels a little weird that’s because there’s supposed to be at least 30-50k building up to it.

“How much longer?” Pod asks, and Sandor grunts, crossing his arms. “Clegane?”

“You care too much, Payne.” Pod glares at him.

“And you don’t?”

“I’m doing this because I care.”

“You’re a sick bastard.”

Sandor doesn’t look away from her, though, despite his professed apathy. Pod doesn’t either. She’s sitting there trembling on the other side of the two-way mirror. Her eye-makeup is smudged—she’s been wiping her eyes a lot because her tears have loosened her contact lenses—and periodically her lips tremble as she tries not to cry again.

“How much longer?” Pod repeats.

Sandor doesn’t bother replying this time.

“You’re a beast, you know,” Pod says. He grabs his coffee mug and marches out into the hallway. It’s been a long day, and it’s going to be a longer night.

“Good work, Payne,” someone calls to him and he makes a noise of acknowledgement before he goes into the kitchen. Now is not a time for a moment to revel in his victory. It doesn’t feel like a victory. It feels like a lie. It was a lie, and she’s about to find out the truth. _And hate me_ , he thinks. He hopes she won’t. She might not. He tries to cling to that hope.

“Hardyng was released,” Hunt tells him as he fills up his mug with the blackest coffee he can find. If he weren’t so anxious, he’d run down to the Starbucks at the corner and have them give him a triple shot of espresso. “ _Star Eyes_ has it, so I imagine—”

“Yep,” Pod says, cutting him off. He doesn’t need to know which magazines know that he and Hardyng got into a fight and that cops were called and which ones are speculating that Alayne’s friend and boyfriend might have been fighting over _her._ As if that were half of it.

Brienne’s already gone into meet with the captain, whom, he imagines, has been getting angry phone calls from Baelish ever since the fight. It’s only a matter of time before he shows up. Pod turns on his heel and leaves the kitchen, going back to the interrogation room.

The observation deck is empty when he gets in and he closes the door behind him right as Sandor and Brienne go into the room.

“Is Pod alright?” Alayne—Sansa—asks. He guesses he should start thinking of her as Sansa now, though he’s trained himself out of it, while he was undercover. It had been hard enough to start thinking about her as Alayne, even if she was the sort of pop icon that the news wouldn’t shut up about. Once he’d seen Catelyn Stark’s high cheekbones, there was no unseeing her as Sansa, and sure, the “digital media reporter” he’d been pretending to be bumbled, but he didn’t misspeak quite that drastically.

Her voice is breathy yet also thick somehow. Pod rubs his hand along his cheekbone where Harry had decked him. He imagines it’s bruising a bit, but he doesn’t care. “Please, is he—”

“He’s taken care of,” Brienne says, not unkindly, and Sansa sags in her seat.

“Hardyng’s been released, and Payne’s not pressing charges,” Brienne continues. “So, all in all, not as bad as it could be.”

“Why am I still here, then?” Sansa asks, and Pod watches as her eyes flicker between Sandor and Brienne. She’s not looking at Sandor’s burns, which always makes him angry. Pod sips his coffee and leans forward, resting his hand on a table, watching her closely.

“We have a few extra questions for you,” Brienne says. “Should have you out in a few minutes.”

“Extra questions?” Sansa asks nervously. “Do I need my lawyer? Or my father—”

“We’ve got your father next door,” Sandor says. “He’s facing charges for abduction right now.” Pod glances out of the window in the door. He sees no sign of Baelish having arrived yet, but it’s only a matter of time. It doesn’t matter. Sansa won’t leave that room until he’s in custody. He turns back to the glass.

Pod sees Brienne give Sandor a look, sees Sansa go still like a deer who’s just heard a noise, and he takes another sip of coffee before putting the mug down on the table. He can’t keep drinking coffee right now. His heart is hammering. He can run on adrenaline alone, the way he has for most of today. That’ll get him through.

“Abduction charges?” Sansa asks.

“Yes,” Sandor says at the same time that Brienne says, “Alayne, can you tell me where you were in August about ten years ago?”

Her face is very still, the smooth face of a practiced liar, and Pod clenches his fist.

“I was in Michigan with my mother,” Alayne says and Pod closes his eyes. _No, you weren’t_ , he wants to say.

“Where in Michigan?” Brienne asks.

“Flint,” Alayne replies.

“This was around when she was dying, yes?”

“Yes.”

“And you’d not had contact with Baelish before then?” Sandor barks.

“No, not really,” Alayne says and Pod opens his eyes again and stares at her. Her eyes are blank, and she’s gone away inside, the way she’d told him she did one night when she was tipsy and talking about her childhood and how there were things that happened that just made her wish that she’d…she’d…her voice had trailed away. _I need to be strong for my father_ , she’d said, and Pod had remembered photographs in her files of Ned Stark walking down the Boardwalk in New Jersey with Sansa on his shoulders while she ate ice cream and wore sunglasses shaped like stars. Sunglasses that looked like the sunglasses on the cover of Alayne Stone’s second album.

“What did you know of him?” Brienne asks.

“Nothing,” she says slowly.

“Did you know he was a friend of your mother’s?”

“No.”

“Have you ever heard the name Sansa Stark?” Sandor asks roughly and Pod sees Brienne kick him under the table while Sansa goes even stiller, if that’s even possible.

“Maybe,” she says slowly. “That was in the news, wasn’t it? A little girl?”

Sandor opens a file and takes out a photograph—the photograph of Sansa playing dress-up with her little brother Bran, before he’d been paralyzed. Sansa stares at the photograph and her eyes flicker, they harden. “No,” Pod mutters to himself. “No, no. It was too soon.”

“Been missing about ten years. Presumed dead. Have you seen her before?”

“No,” Alayne says.

“I think we both know that’s not true, Miss Stone,” Sandor barks.

“I haven’t,” Alayne says stubbornly.

“Now—” Sandor begins, but Brienne cuts him off.

“Sandor, a word?”

He glares at her and they get to their feet and leave the interrogation room and Pod goes out into the hallway.

“What was that?” Brienne demands.

“I thought—”

“We had it all planned, Sandor. _Planned_.”

“Look, being nice to her wasn’t going to get her to admit she’s Sansa Stark,” Sandor growls.

“So you thought showing her the picture of her brother that Baelish has told her is dead is going to loosen her up some?” Brienne demands angrily. “If you’re going to be a loose canon, Sandor, maybe I should stick you in the room with Baelish instead. At least there your anger will be productive.”

“I’d welcome it,” Sandor says, smiling none-too-warmly, his burned lip contorting horrifically.

“Not yet,” Brienne says. “We need her word.”

“Get a bloody DNA test and have done with it. The little bird doesn’t want to confront reality,” Sandor snaps. “Make her.”

“Can I go in now?” Pod asks quietly. His hands are twitching from the caffeine, and his heart is pounding and maybe if he goes in, maybe if he explains now, she won’t hate him. Brienne and Sandor both turn to look at him. “Look, if Sandor fucked the plan to hell, at least I can go in. What more damage can I do?” Brienne watches him carefully. Then she takes a deep breath.

“Do you have a plan?” she asks him.

“Nope,” Pod says. “Are there plans to be had at this point?”

Sandor snorts. At last, Brienne nods and jerks her head towards the door, and Pod takes a deep breath and goes into the interrogation room.

Sansa is staring at the file—not at the photograph of her and Bran as children, but at the edge of the manila folder. Her eyes are redder on this side of the glass than Pod had noticed before. Red and staring at him in confusion, in numbness. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen her look that numb. _God damn it, Sandor_.

“Do you need to take out your contact lenses?” he asks her quietly. “I can get you a lens case and some saline solution.”

She shakes her head. _Of course not. Green eyes will turn blue._

“You’re a cop?” she asks at last. Pod nods and he sits down opposite her. The game is up. No more lies. “Oh.”

“I imagine you’ve worked out what Sandor was getting at, then,” he says quietly.

Sansa doesn’t say anything. She’s looking at the corner of the table, and, though he can’t see them, he’s sure that she’s wringing her hands in her lap. He waits for her to speak. He always waits for her to speak. He’s the same Pod that she knew, if a little less bumbling; she just needs to realize that. He’ll wait for her to speak, even if they’re sitting there for hours.

He’s overly aware of how loudly his watch ticks as they’re sitting there. He hears the way his breath fills the room, of how quickly his heart is beating in his chest. He watches her—red eyed and face splotchy from tears and upset. _Come on,_ he thinks, willing her to speak. _Come on, you can do it, come on._

“So it was all a lie, then?” she asks him at last. “You being my friend. It was just to get me arrested and into this room? You didn’t really care about me?” Her voice breaks in the last question, and Pod’s stomach lurches.

“Of course I care,” Pod says. He wants to laugh. How much anger had he felt at Harry and all his conquests out in London while Alayne still seemed to pine for him, how much had he reveled when he could make her smile, when she’d first called him a friend? How much had he loved the way her eyes could glow and make his heart stop for just a moment, and make him forget everything and everyone but the two of them?

“Friends don’t lie to one another,” she says coolly.

“No more lies then,” he responds. He’s ready for that. He’s ready for that and, worse, he knows she’s not, but the game is up and if she wants the truth, she’ll have it. She’ll have it, so help him god. He can give her something good, out of this mess. “I care about you more than you realize, Sansa.”

She’s silent for a moment. Then she starts to laugh. Not the laugh he knows, not the laugh he loves, an entirely different kind of laugh. A humorless laugh, the laugh of someone who doesn’t find anything funny, the laugh of someone in more pain than anything else.

“Don’t call me that. I’m not her,” Alayne says.

“You are,” Pod says quietly. And she glares at him. She’s never once glared at him, but she is glaring at him now, and the phrase _if looks could kill_ crosses his mind.

“You care about me, but you refuse to believe I’m who I am?”

“No, I think you refuse to believe you are who you are,” Pod says firmly. “Alayne Stone—for all the shit you get on twitter—is easier than Sansa Stark.”

“Oh. Is that your stunning conclusion?” she asks angrily. “I am not Sansa Stark.”

“You look like your mom, you know,” Pod says. He opens Sandor’s file and digs out a picture of Catelyn Stark. He places it gently on the table. “Sound like her too.   Want to know how we worked it out? It’s a good story. That bit in the middle of _Castles in the Snow_ when you’re talking about snowball fights you had as a girl—you sound just like her. We’d been listening to some tapes from your uncle Edmure’s answering machine from fifteen years ago and suddenly—it was like Catelyn Stark was talking to us with better recording equipment.”

She’s staring at the picture. Staring at it like her life depends on it. Pain doesn’t wrack her face—she keeps it smooth. _Perfect professionalism_ , he remembers Myranda saying early on as he’d been interviewing for his “article”. “If you kept your natural hair color…I’m assuming your hair didn’t go from being red to brown without dye. I guess it could have changed color when you were an adolescent, but that happens more to little kids than to teenagers.”

“She’s dead,” Sansa says. “She died.”

“Yes,” Pod says gently.

“He loved her. My…my…”

“Abductor?”

“He didn’t abduct me,” Sansa flared. “He was protecting me. From people who wanted to kill me the way they killed my mother and father and brothers.”

“Brothers?” Pod asks.

“And sister,” she adds quickly. “They’re dead too. Or didn’t you know? It’s just me.”

“Is that what he told you?” Pod asks, and he can just _see_ Brienne’s eyes bugging out of her head and Sandor’s muttered _motherfucker_ behind that mirror.

“Yes,” Sansa said. “A long time ago. When I was…when he first…” she’s scrambling. Scrambling to remember. He can practically hear the questions in her head. _When had it happened? Had it happened?_ That’d be one of the first questions that Brienne asks Baelish, of that he’s sure.

Pod opens the file and shuffles through it. “If things had gone right, after your parents’ accident you should have gone to your mom’s brother Edmure. That’s where your siblings are right now. Well, not Arya. Arya’s at Harvard right now, second semester of her junior year. Bran’s applying to schools, though, and Rickon’s playing Enjolras in the school’s production of Les Mis. Quite the set of pipes on him, I’m led to believe. Rather like you.” He pulls out the Christmas card that Edmure had sent them this past year and pushes it across the table to Sansa, right next to the photograph of her and Bran as kids. There the three of them are, smiling in one picture, goofing off in another while Edmure and Roslin look on lovingly.

Sansa stares at it—stares at it as if she’s seeing ghosts. She stares for minutes and minutes, drinking them in, the way that Bran’s grinning in the first picture to fake-screaming as Arya chomps at his neck like a vampire, the way that Arya’s hand is resting on Bran’s shoulder and is thrown over Rickon’s even though he’s taller than her—that Rickon is _taller_ than Arya.

“They miss you,” Pod says. “We send them updates every few weeks—haven’t been able to alert them of any progress. Your uncle says they can’t talk about you because it makes them upset—not knowing if you’re alive or dead. Bran has all your albums, by the way. Wants desperately to go to one of your concerts.”

And the dam breaks. Tears are leaking out of her eyes and she reaches up and brushes them away, then mutters, “Fuck. I—fuck.” The rubbing of her eyes irritates her contacts again, and Pod says, again, “Do you want me to get you a lens case?”

“Yes,” Sansa sobs. “Please. Yes. I—I—No. No.”

And a moment later her fingers are in her eyes, tugging off the soft lenses and she throws them on the table, clearly not concerned about wearing them again. Her eyes are so blue, and the red from the tears makes the blue that much more pronounced. Pod gets to his feet and drags his chair around the table to sit next to her. “It’ll be all right,” he whispers. “I promise, it will be.”

She turns and wraps her arms around him, sobbing. “No,” she whispers. “It won’t be. It never will be.”

“That’s just the tiredness,” he says. “It’ll be all right. I promise.”

He’s so tired. But Sansa’s arms are around him and she’s got blue eyes. He sits there, holding her for a while, not saying a word, not needing to. There’s nothing he can say. Just being here is all he can give her.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for all of your support! I'm so glad you enjoyed!
> 
> I've never done this before, but this verse is too built in my head and I like it too much to let it sit. I'm probably not going to write the whole longfic, but I'll write drabbles in the verse if you want to send me prompts over at [planlessfic](http://planlessfic.tumblr.com). If I get enough of them, the earlier parts of the fic may write itself! If you don't have a tumblr account, you can also prompt me in the comments section and I'll try to remember them over here :)


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